Industry Advisor and Judge at Cornell Tech Product Studio

I'm serving as an industry advisor to a team in Cornell Tech's Product Studio for the 2026 cycle, and as a judge in the CRITS sessions where student teams present their work for critique.

Product Studio pairs graduate teams with a real challenge from a real organisation and gives them a semester to get from an ambiguous prompt to something defensible. Advisors are paired with a team for the whole semester, meeting with them to give feedback on progress and help direct their efforts. The job is not to hand them the answer. It is to ask the question that shows them their solution is answering a problem nobody has, early enough that the semester is still recoverable.

The CRITS format helps with that. Teams present, get critiqued in the open, and have to defend their reasoning rather than their demo – which is a much closer simulation of a design review than a final presentation ever is.